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I'm looking at it on the virtualization front as well

For me I don't give a rats about the gaming or desktop app performance which is what keeps getting benchmarked. How does it handle 4 VM's, and 3 of them have 2 vCPU's? For that type of load, it seems this chip is perfect for home server usage. Going forward I think this is the right direction in architecture since everything (in business, and some at home too) is going to virtual, from phones, tablets, and desktops, while new "servers" are already almost all virtual already. The big issue is this is a version 1 part, and it is still server tuned rather than desktop. AMD's strategy *should* work well LONG term, but short term? Yeah, not good. Intel is still betting on single threaded performance, and that could backfire really quick if everything *finally* shifts to multithreaded now that the writing is firmly on the wall... Time will tell whether Intel's current strategy or AMD's current strategy will succeed or backfire. I'd prefer that AMD keep going and innovating, since Intel hasn't proven itself capable of doing that in the absence of proper competition.

if intel wanted to sell an 8 core desktop cpu they would have done that. i7-39xx cpus are internally 8 cores with only 6 enabled. the new xeon single socket series will feature 8 cores at lower clockspeed. i dont think that amd has got a superior strategy in the long run, amd is just currently faster with some bulldozer server (opteron) benchmarks until intel will get the new xeons ready.

the main reason why the fastest intel desktop cpu does not use 8 cores is that turbo boost will work much better when more cores are idle so that the max tdp is not maxed out already at a lower clock speed. that means with fewer cores the cpu can run longer with higher turbo modes. with a shrinked layout that problem could be fixed most likely but will take a while. often amd has got production problems with its chips, at least more than intel when they want to shrink em. the splitted foundary is not even able to build trinity and gfx chips so tsmc needs to build those.